Casual gaming developers Digital Chocolate are on a roll this month, releasing yet another mobile-turned-Web game just this week. Rollercoaster Rush—originally a tiny action game for cell phones—has been revamped and upgraded to Flash, showcasing better graphics and an improved collection of levels. Rollercoaster Rush puts you behind the "wheel" of a rollercoaster brake operator. Essentially, it's your job to ensure that passengers have the thrill of their life, while at the same time making sure it's not their last. Just as any seasoned operator will tell you, the first rule in rollercoaster school is to avoid sending your passengers flying off the track to the pavement a hundred feet below. It's just bad for business.

So in Rollercoaster Rush, you control just two things: the acceleration and braking of the coaster. It's a pretty simple setup; just use [left arrow] to apply the brakes and [right arrow] to speed up. If you need to pause the action, just hit the menu button at the top of the screen. Each level presents you with a different rollercoaster track, beginning with simple ups and downs and eventually leading into severe slopes and multiple loops. A moment before each change in the track occurs, a moving yellow sign will appear on the screen, indicating the shape of the upcoming track. As the sign comes nearer to its outlined frame in the middle, the less time you have to adjust before it's too late. This usually gives you the time you need to alter speed; either accelerating so that you can climb a hill or blast through loops, or applying the breaks to ensure that you're not at top speed at the crest of a hill, which would send the rollercoaster cars flying away or crashing into a piece of upcoming track.

Scoring is simply tied to how much fun the customers are having. The passengers in the cars will display little smiley-faces when you're doing a good job of giving them their money's worth. The wider their smiles, the more fun they're having and the higher your score will be. And the happier your customers are, the more they'll spread the word about your rollercoaster skills, leading more passengers to board your coaster in subsequent levels. As a well-designed incentive, you've got to obtain a high enough customer satisfaction rating before you can move on to the next track, or you'll have to repeat the level until you get it right.

Analysis: If you didn't know any better, you might mistake Rollercoaster Rush for a Nitrome game at first glance. The action and style are similar, and judging by the popularity of most Nitrome games, that's a compliment for this game. Levels increase in difficulty at a steady pace as you're met with harder obstacles like multiple loops, mountain-like slopes and even crazy track jumps. Things get really interesting when all these elements are smashed together close to one another. It requires some pretty precise speeding up and slowing down at just the right moments, or you'll either send your passengers flying to their doom or give them a boring ride. The graphics and sound are both rendered nicely in this Flash upgrade of the original, although judging by the developer's recent work, one has to wonder if they could have designed it a bit prettier.

Digital Chocolate also offers a PC version of the game to buy; a downloadable game with 75 total levels on three continents. The free online version offers the U.S. levels only. Although the game itself is a short ride in all, it's a fun one, especially if you're a fan of action games (that goes double for you rollercoaster junkies out there).

Cute game. It seems the main trick is to keep pressing right every time you try the level for the first time and try to remember where you crash, then replay the level and move your finger away on those places. Brakes seem to be redundant, at least in the first half of the game.

I just don't like how the game forces me to press "play" too often. If I pressed "replay track" then yes, I want to replay it, why confirm it yet again!?

I think the main problem here is not that there are so many menus you have to click through, but that you have to click through them - the gameplay is keyboard-only, but the menus are mouse-only. That's a big interface no-no in my book.

Really fun game concept... but execution needs some more help. I loved it until I started getting to the more difficult levels; there needs to be a much more meaningful warning system to show what's coming down the track. Also, mouse-only menus between keyboard-only gameplay is very annoying.

oh god so massively agree with "Don't have one interface for the game and another for the menus" and also, this isn't some new, cutting-edge game for the PC! The game is based off of games (java, I think) almost identical bar the tracks from some time ago. More PC-to-phone-back-to-PC.

I agree that the menu and gameplay should both use either the mouse or the keyboard. It's really a bother to have to click on 'replay' and 'play' when you have an infinite number of lives, and you just want to go back and try that again.

I really liked this game other than the fact that one could not simply leave their hands on the keyboard. I found that for the levels it was rather hard to find out what was ahead so one had to replay them several times to figure out the timing and then go back to the first level quickly to get some people so that I could get five stars. I also found that I could not get five stars if I braked at all during the ride. Did anyone succeed in getting five stars when they braked? I think the fact that they made the "no brakes" award so important probably had to do with this.
Other than that the game was rather unique and nice.

I may be wrong, but it seems to me the number of stars has to do with how many awards you recieve (which may or may not include the no brakes award... I have gotten 5 stars without it), so you need to replay some levels several time to push the envelope far enough to achieve it. It also has nothing to do with how many passengers you have.

I think the star rating depends on your track high score, and more people = more score, so having more folks should help. On the other hand, the score bonus from awards massively outweighs score from passengers, so it's not all that important.

Also, let me add one more voice to the chorus of people begging for keyboard-usable menus in a keyboard-only game. Sheesh, you'd think developers would have this one down by now! Nobody wants to move their hands around between every single run...

For me, using 3 people on Spacious Skies is the magic number. Also, the longer you stay upside down on the loops, the more points you get. At least that's what it looks like to me. Although you can't go too slow, otherwise you'll fall off. Then it's all luck on getting the awards on the track.

I was stuck at only getting around 800 or so points, then when i figured out what to do, I got my score up to 1300ish.

Fun trying to figure out the means by which to achieve the five stars.

When the timing is just too difficult to be worth the time it takes to do it over enough times til you finally get it right, you can alway of cheat.

Slopes aren't perfectly curved so on the top of a sharp slope there's at least one bump (if not two).
Run your first car over the bump to get a smile.
Quickly brake to a stop.
Let yourself roll back down the hill just enough to get back past the bump(s).
Brake. Curiously when you brake going backwards you come to immediat fullstop, which serves our purpose well.
Repeat until you have "enough" points then finish the track without taking risks.
The number of stars awarded at the end of the track only reflects how high you scored. I think it's around 700 to get all stars.

This is A COOL game . i Love It.
But Ive Completed all The tracks . Got 5stars on all of them. and They hav all come up with that Star on The Circle. But I Cant Play On The Other like Island Place.
:S . I Cannot do anything else. ive completed evrythin on that 1 to the MAX.
and now i cant get to the other world from AMERICA to FRANCE

This game is fun. I've beaten every level but Trollercoaster. How do you beat it?

In levels #1(Freedom Flight) and #5 (Spacious Skies) you can just press the accellerater and then you win, AND get a no brakes award! You can also get a no brakes award on Rock and Roll, #2, but make sure you slow after the double loop! Don't do anything until you can to go up at a 90 degree angle.

I like the game, and so do my children. I had just about 5 stars on all american tracks, had France and Australia opened up. Then my 5 year old wanted to play. She got on and apparently clicked on start new career. I lost it all. Aarrgghh. Would be nice if there was a SAVE CAREER feature.

I'm addicted to the game but I agree with the other comments my other problem with the game which is so annoying to me is that there is no separation between players there are 5 people in my family and this game has no way to save a game for a individual which really sucks!

HELP! I know this sounds really stupid, but i can't get past the 2nd level in America. I keep crashing, no matter what I do. I speed up- crash. Ibrake- crash. I do nothing- CRASH!! arghh its soo annoying!!

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